Mobile Success Story: MyPocket
As a mobile product manager I always wondered which steps you need to take and what conditions to fulfil to convert ideas to the popular applications. Do you need a lot of money? incredible luck? or just a huge amount of smart and hard work. So today I’m starting to write about mobile apps and their paths from ideas to the successful businesses. If you have a story to tell just drop me a letter at me@alarin.ru
Today I tell you MyPocket’s story. It is the paid $2 iPhone application for storing your documents like your ID card, SSN and your credit card info.
400,000 users have installed MyPocket since May, 2013. The app generated $200,000 in total revenue. Now MyPocket produces a profit of $10,000 per month. Most of the profits are from the Russian AppStore.
All figures in this article calculated with 32 Rubles per Dollar exchange rate.
Creators of the app Sergey Pakhandrin and Pavel Nakonechniy invented the idea in 2012. Both of them were working as contractors for a Canadian outsourcing company in Tomsk (the small city in Siberia). If you are a contractor in Russia you should have a special bank account. And, I don’t know why, in most cases you will have a tense relationship with your bank. So Sergey and Pavel often visited the bank to sign papers. Sometimes the guys forgot their documents, and were wasting a lot of their time. There the idea was born: the App to store your document data in one place: ID card, SSN, credit card, medical insurance info.
The design was made by the App’s co-founder Pavel. The iOS Developer was a friend. He developed the App in his spare time.
To create iPhone MVP the founders spent 2.5 months and $3,300
When MyPocket was released, Sergey and Pavel asked their friends to download the App and shout about it in social networks. Also Sergey asked opinion leaders to share MyPocket. One of them was Alex Patsay popular Mac blogger in Russia, his retweet brought the App to 3rd place in the AppStore Category.
Social shouts by friends and opinion leaders brought MyPocket to the TOP-5 paid overall of the Russian Appstore.
Downloads from the first 3 days returned all investments. The founders spent their first profits to buy paid reviews on AppleInsider.ru, iPhones.ru and LiveHacker.ru. Paid reviews is the only tool used by Sergey to promote MyPocket.
MyPocket is maintaining his place in the App Store top by itself. Sergey just buys paid reviews once per two months.
A business angel offered the investment to MyPocket in May 2013. Sergey and Pavel accepted. The investment helped to hire three full-time developers and significantly accelerated development.
The Android version was launched in December 2013. The guys have almost no profit from it. It was downloaded 80,000 times; just 20,000 of them were paid.
Freemium
The MyPocket team is trying to move from Paid to Freemium model. The first step was to add one paid feature. If you want to group your documents in folders you should buy the feature ‘Folders’ for $2 (the same that the app costs).
Most of users were irritated by the paid function in the paid app. But 10% of users have bought this feature. So the guys increased their profit from the app by 10%.
Sergey says that they are now moving toward freemium app, they will try to release new free MyPocket with limitation and premium in-apps to unlock them.
Analytics
Flurry, Google Analytics and Answers are installed in MyPocket. Sergey
uses the analytics to monitor DAU, MAU, the quantity of new documents per user, the most popular document categories, the most viewable
documents and the funnel for only the in-app purchase buying process.
Sergey has created the custom Flurry Dashboard for these metrics.
The analytics data is often used in product decisions.
For example, the order of documents on the New Document screen is based on document popularity. If users store more ID cards than medical
insurance info, than the ID card template will be the first.
Or when the guys added Instagram and GMail credentials to MyPocket,
they became more popular than medical insurance info. That means that
it was a good idea to add this feature.
Or Sergey can see that only 60% of users saw the buy folders button. That means the team should force paid-feature introduction to all users.
Push, Ask for Review and e-Mail
MyPocket doesn’t send push notifications. But this function is already in development. The app will send notification when one of your documents valid period comes to an end.
MyPocket used to ask users to leave a review in the AppStore by standard alert box. The alert box was shown after adding 3 documents and 15 days after install. But Sergey has no statistics about this and the function was removed.
MyPocket has a rare for mobile apps function — the email newsletter. Users were asked for their email on second launch. 30% of users leave their email.
Newsletters tell users about the new App releases. There were three letters for half a year. The first letter was opened by 10 500 people (from 28 000) DAU increased from 4 800 to 5 200.
Nowadays and Plans
The MyPocket team now consists of 7people: iOS, Android, Windows Phone developer, designer and 3 founders. The third founder is the mentor from MetaBeta Accelerator.
Sergey and the rest of the team are trying to increase revenues.
The first way is other mobile platforms. The guys launched the Windows Phone version in Febuary 2015. The WP version has 10 paid installs per day. Also there will be Mac and Windows versions soon.
The second way is to conquer other country’s markets. The Russian mobile market is small and there is no way to receive more revenue. Sergey tried to conquer the USA AppStore but has had no luck with that yet.
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